Nick Clegg taken to task by the audience at the Chiswick Book Festival

Nick Clegg and Caroline Frost at Chiswick Book Festival

Photographs by Roger Green

Former politician and Facebook executive dodges questions about the morality of Big Tech

Nick Clegg was at the Chiswick Book Festival on Friday night (11 September), talking about his book How To Save the Internet – The Threat to Global Connection in the Age of AI and Political Conflict.

It is a threat many of us may not even be aware of, which is why he chose to write the book, he told the audience in St Michael & All Angels Church.

He is uniquely placed to talk about it, having been both a senior politician and an executive in one of the world’s biggest technology companies.

He led the Liberal Democrats and served as Deputy Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015 in coalition with the Conservatives under David Cameron’s leadership. When he lost his seat in 2017, he then went to the States as vice‑president of global affairs and communications at Facebook, Inc, now Meta Platforms, where he was promoted to president for global affairs in 2022.

He left in 2025 when Donald Trump became President for the second time, coming back to the UK to buy a house in Chiswick.

Former politicians become very adept at evading answering questions about their responsibility for decisions made when they were in power. Nick Clegg showed he was equally adroit at not owning responsibility for any of the bad behaviour of Big Tech.

The audience at St Michael & All Angels Church

Abrham Meareg’s £1.8bn lawsuit against Meta

There were a couple of women in the audience at St Michael & All Angels Church with a lot of knowledge in that area who put very direct questions to him. One, who represented a client with a legal case against Facebook, he shut down very firmly:

“I don’t know the individual case. There are 4 billion people who use Facebook. It’s not reasonable to ask me to comment on it”.

Surprising he did not recognise the case though, as it is very well known and was in the news while he was in post.

Abrham Meareg is taking Meta to court after his father was murdered in Ethiopia, shot dead after being attacked in Facebook posts. The case, reported by Reuters and the BBC in 2022, alleges Facebook’s algorithm helped fuel the viral spread of hate and violence during Ethiopia’s civil war.

The Kenyan High Court ruled last August the case could go ahead and Meta now faces a £1.8bn lawsuit. The woman who posed the question wanted Nick Clegg to make a public apology to Abrham. Their case is that Facebook did not act to take the hate speech off its platform, effectively helping the violence to escalate.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee, told the US Senate in 2021 the platform’s algorithm was “fanning ethnic violence… picking up the extreme sentiments, the division”.

She testified before the US Senate about it in October 2021, while Nick Clegg was vice‑president of global affairs and communications, saying:

“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people”.

She published her memoir The Power of One: How I Found the Strength to Tell the Truth and Why I Blew the Whistle on Facebook in 2023.

Nick Clegg, former Deputy Prime Minister and former president for global affairs at Facebook

Careless People author Sarah Wynn-Williams – “I think she left before I joined”

Asked about Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book Careless People and its highly critical analysis of Facebook’s responses to global sociopolitical events, including its role in the Rohingya genocide, all Nick Clegg said was:

“I haven’t read the book, and I think she left before I joined”.

She did leave Facebook before he joined, in 2017, and did not publish Careless People until 2025, but she filed a Whistleblower complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission – a 78‑page document in which she accused the company of misleading investors – in April 2024, while he was president for global affairs. I imagine it was discussed at the most senior level.

Nick Clegg did answer the general point about the morality of the company he worked for, telling the audience in St Michael & All Angels Church on Saturday:

“I wouldn’t have stayed seven days, much less seven years if I thought they were awful, amoral people”.

Nick Clegg and Caroline Frost with the audience at the Chiswick Book Festival

Big Tech ‘ruining the livelihoods’ of creative people

The other very well-informed question came from Deborah Annetts, CEO at Independent Society of Musicians and co-author of Brave New World? Justice for Creators in the Age of Gen AI – a report on ‘the industrial scale theft of the UK’s cultural riches’ by AI companies stripping creative content and subsuming it into their vast data resources.

Deborah asked Nick Clegg whether he believed Meta should have to comply with UK copyright law.

“Of course the company should abide by the law of the land”, he said. But he qualified that by describing the process it was “more complicated” than she suggested.

“They don’t take a book and reproduce it as it is. They tokenise the data”.

Sure, but writers have also found their entire books reproduced, as Deborah would have told him had she had the chance to respond.

Nick Clegg and Caroline Frost

The internet is “far more fragile than more people imagine”

Book festivals aren’t the place for public rows. The authors are there to plug their books, and Nick Clegg was interesting about the bits he wanted to talk about, but this is such a vast subject, there was plenty more the audience wanted him to address.

In her introduction Caroline Frost raised the issues of social media and children, the effect on democracy and the power of generative AI tools. He chose to focus on the increasing fragmentation of the internet.

“It is a much more accidental and fragile thing than we imagine. The history of the internet is largely accidental. It was almost a bric-a-brac creation – a series of pipework joined together in a way that is far more fragile than more people imagine”.

He spoke about how China had successfully built a wall around its own internet, how Russia was now trying to divide up the internet, and how political reaction to globalisation around the world has been to pull up the drawbridge, citing Brexit and the actions of Trump and Modi.

“Politicians are reacting against the globalisation of the internet, which will lead to the increasing degradation and Balkanisation of the internet”.

Nick Clegg and Caroline Frost

We are dependent on “the whims of companies over which we have no control”

He agreed the Big Tech companies needed to be regulated.

“I think there should be far greater transparency imposed on these huge companies. It is totally reasonable for governments around the world to demand greater transparency on how algorithms work and how AI systems are trained”.

But he said by their very nature, these companies very quickly become huge because their products are so useful, and governments are always trying to catch up.

“WhatsApp is only useful to us because everyone else uses it”.

The UK is entirely reliant on the industry based in Silicon Valley.

We are dependent on “the whims of companies over which we have no control. I bet you mostly have iphones. The navigation tool you used to come here is American. Your data is stored on an American cloud”.

But regulation is not going to happen unless the Americans have an incentive to change things, he said.

“I think Americans will have a change of heart not because of altruism but because they are losing out to the Chinese. They will realise they need friends and need to reach out to India and Europe”.

The audience at St Michael & All Angels Church

“You cannot underestimate how much they are driven by outdoing their competitors”

Caroline asked him what Mark Zuckerberg was like in person, and his answer was revealing of how the industry operated.

“He is unbelievably competitive. He’s a good listener when he wants to learn something and very stubborn once he’s made a decision.

“You cannot underestimate how much they are driven by outdoing their competitors”.

We should not expect them to understand the morality or the ethics involved in what they do, he said.

“They’re engineers, not politicians or philosopher kings. They are not equipped to deal with ethical, moral, societal issues but the tendency is for us to give them this status”.

Nick Clegg’s book How to Save the Internet is available from local bookshops and online.

The session was sponsored by the Arts Society, Chiswick.

Nick Clegg signing copies of his book after the event